Relationships are money. You have heard it but are you actually experiencing this for yourself?
Every successful Salesmaker is the proud owner of a substantial contact database. It exists in many formats and locations. Business card stacks from a recent trade show. A Rolodex from your early years in sales. The CRM tool of choice of your current employer. Your Outlook contacts. Your LinkedIn connections and even your Twitter followers. It is typically guarded and kept away from the eyes of peers, bosses and company executives with a passion. Wherever your contacts are located, they traditionally are the most prized asset of a SalesMaker. People are recruited and hired because of them, legal battles over non-compete agreements are fought over them, and they always hold promise for future business. These contacts are most often customers, but also contain business partners, manufacturers, fellow employees and even competitors.
Today’s WebTool is Reach, the Social Contact Manager from MyWayInteractive.com Reach is an intriguing Web Tool that combines the many advantages of social networking and the contacts that you have accumulated into a WebTool that you can use to gain additional contacts and contacts that are important to you in your cold call, prospecting and sales responsibilities. Reach is a social contact manager for sales professionals and small business owners. Reach provides live secure connections between salespeople for the trading of qualified leads. It provides a secure platform to “trade” leads with other sales professionals that are in a non-competitive or complimentary role.
Using Reach, salespeople and small business owners are able to immediately generate greater sales revenues and expand their number of qualified leads while building collaboration networks with other sales and business professionals. Sales people can now conduct business at new levels of productivity using the collective account knowledge of thousands of sales peers. When you hit that roadblock in your cold call activity or are at a dead-end with your prospecting efforts within a targeted company, this Webtool will open up new avenues to make the desired connection, possibly even with a referral into the desired decision-maker.
Here is a brief overview of how Reach works:
- You have contacts within companies.
- You would like to obtain new contacts within your target prospects and current customers.
- There are many other non-competitive or complimentary SalesMakers engaged within the same account from other companies.
- There are manufacturer reps engaged within the same accounts.
- You can search the database for a contact within a specific company.
- The name and contact information is NOT provided at this point
- You initiate a trade of contact information with the owner of that contact for a contact that you have that they would like.
Examples: If you are selling copiers into Company X, others are selling Computers, office supplies, recruiting services, and numerous other advisory services to them at the same time. There are manufacturer reps from most of the major companies calling on the same company. Would it be beneficial for all to share contacts with each other? You are not competing with each other. In many scenarios you are not even crossing paths. How about the ability to create a private “network” of these same people to collaborate?
Another example that holds great promise is for a very large, multi-divisional sales organization. The company will have various sales teams for printers, computers, servers, infrastructure, storage, software, services, leasing and even recycling. How useful would it be to share information and contacts effortlessly with each other?
Reach is a hosted, free service that includes:
- Personal web based contact manager
- Sales trading partner locator
- Exchange engine for anonymous trading
- Secure network for information exchange
- Easy integration of your LinkedIn Contacts
- Integration of your Twitter Followers
- Fast, responsive customer support if you have a question
Reach has three tabs you use to work with your contacts (plus Settings tab):
Home Tab
Contacts
From this tab, you can manage, update and stay up to date with everyone that is important to you. After importing your contacts from Twitter, LinkedIn, Outlook and other sources, they are all visible to you from this tab. Note the three sub-tabs on the right under the contacts name. Info is the basic contact information that you would expect, fully editable. The News Tab is my most used, showing current web activity and information for the company and contact.
Messages
As your network grows and you become active within the Reach network, the Messages tab will become active with other members asking to trade your contacts for contacts of theirs. I must confess that I did not realize the real power of Reach until I had uploaded my contacts and started receiving inquiries from other members. There are real sales being closed because of Reach, you’ve just got to jump in.
A recent feature that is providing tangible value to organizations with a large number of sales people and/or locations is the Reach Private Network. MyWayInteractive is able to create a private, secure environment where your Salesmakers can share information that could be helpful to others with your company.
Example: You sell to technology products and services to a leading software company with offices and activities worldwide. You have multiple divisions and product lines from printers to desktop PC’s to servers to Infrastructure, and you would like to be able to add professional services to the mix. Once you have created your own private Reach network, your sales team can add all of their contacts into Reach, allowing contact and history across all divisions and geography. The team at MyWayInteractive has created successful networks for other types of organizations with a need to leverage their customer’s contacts including Tom Hopkins International, Sales Gravy, and CanDoGo.
You can create a personal account easily by visiting MyWayInteractive website and creating your Reach account. They will also be able to talk with you about creating your own private Reach Network.
Create your account, load some of your contacts, make a trade or two and let me know what you think of the experience.
